No fewer than 11 new trademark registrations from BMW suggest the firm is planning two distinct ranges of electric bikes.
The company registered the marks with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, and of the 11 registrations most indicate that last year’s Vision DC Roadster could lead to a toned-down production spin off.
BMW has registered nine trademarks around the ‘DC’ branding. They start with ‘DC 01’ and run to ‘DC 09’, with each one specifically intended for use on motorcycles. That doesn’t necessarily mean BMW is set to immediately launch a nine-model range based on the Vision DC’s design, but it suggests the firm has plans for multiple machines and wants to make sure it owns the rights to all the names it might use on them.
While the Vision DC was overtly futuristic, BMW also revealed its E-Power Roadster prototype last December – a running electric bike that used parts from existing gas-powered machines including the front of an S1000R and the shaft-drive rear of an R-series boxer. The chances are that the production DC models will use elements from the DC Vision’s styling wrapped around the fully functional electric drivetrain of the E-Power Roadster.
As to what the ‘01’ to ‘09’ numbers could stand for, they may be different styles of bike – street, touring and adventure models, for instance – or they might be references to battery size or performance. Alternatively BMW could simply be planning to use the ‘DC’ branding for a long time and wants to make sure it can create multiple generations without hitting trademark problems.
At the same time that it filed the ‘DC’ trademark applications, BMW also put paperwork in for rights to the names ‘CE 02’ and ‘CE 04’. Where the ‘DC’ trademarks are specifically for ‘motorcycles’ the ‘CE’ marks are intended for ‘motorcyles/scooters’ and it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see how the existing C Evolution name could mutate into ‘CE’ branding once there’s more than one model in the range.
As with the DC trademarks, there’s no firm indication as to how a ‘CE 02’ might differ from a ‘CE 04’, but the numbers are likely to relate to the bikes’ size, range or power.
